Thanks very much, that's very helpful. Are there any other considerations for choosing an upgraded hard drive? Newegg lists SATA models at 1.5gb/s and 3gb/s. Is that a difference that would affect compatibility?

Many thanks for your help. One last question - I'm helping out a friend and I have no familiarity with this series laptop: does it have the typical Thinkpad-esque recovery partition so I can avoid making recovery CDs to do the reinstall?

Excellent, thanks so much for the help. I've gotten hold of the computer and now I'm trying to figure out how to create the recovery discs. We've decided to upgrade the 40GB hard drive so I figured I could create recovery discs and restore that way once I have the new drive in. I've gotten into the LenovoCare bootup menu but I can't find any way to create the discs from there and obviously restoring directly from the partition isn't going to work for me. Any ideas?

It does boot to Windows but the Thinkvantage folder in the start menu is empty. There is still the Thinkvantage folder in the Program Files directory. Is there a particular program that I should be looking for? And do I understand correctly that Lenovo Care is something else that isn't relevant to this problem?

Here's what I'd do. Backup important files on the hard drive to external media. Hold the Thinkvantage button down on boot and go into recovery. Select restore hard drive to factory state and follow the prompts. Once it's restored boot into windows and select 'create recovery media'. I don't know why the Thinkvantage folder is empty unless 1.) somebody deleted all of the Thinkvantage pgms. or 2.) it was not a factory build to begin with.

Wow, that's a great idea that never would have occurred to me. Thank you! So if I do this and I can get the CDs created after restoring the system the factory specs, I should be able to use the CDs to install the same system setup after I've installed the new HDD, correct?

I think I may have another XP license available for use so I may go that route. I somehow doubt that losing the Lenovo Care functionality would be very significant. And doing a clean XP install might be somewhat leaner.

Everything went according to plan - I'm stunned. Thank you so much. It would have been a much rockier road without your help.

One more question I have is whether the factory restore actually went ahead and recreated the recovery partition. It sure looks like it. I guess that makes logical sense, I just wasn't expecting it somehow. Pretty good system they've put together.